you're not wrong. A lot of them could simply be flakes or just cloned dotfiles. Just look at Omarchy, that's basically Arch with in installer and dotfiles.
If I'm looking to use a distro I want something that improves whatever it's based on, like CachyOS for example that has it's own repos and kernel. Distros that essentially just tweak GNOME or KDE I'm going to pass on. Like this PearOS. you can just download virtually any distro and install Plasma and make it look the same.